Effect of second-formant transitions on the perception of Hebrew voiced stop consonants

Studies in English, Dutch, Danish and French show that of the possible acoustic cues that listeners use for the perception of place of articulation, the transition of the second formant (F2) appears to be a very important cue. Although the Hebrew language shares some similarities with the above languages, one cannot assume that it either has similar acoustic-articulatory patterns or uses the same cues for perception. The general goal of the present study was, therefore, to investigate the effect of the starting frequency of F2 transition on the perception of place of articulation of Hebrew voiced plosives in initial position. Sixteen Hebrew-speaking young normal-hearing adults served as subjects. Stimuli were generated by re-synthesizing a naturally spoken /ba/ syllable into 17 test syllables by varying only the starting frequency of F2. Listeners heard each stimulus six times (total of 102) at random and were required to label the stimuli as /ba/, /da/ or /ga/. Results showed that varying only F2 transitions caused a perceptual change of place of articulation for all listeners. There was, however, large inter-subject variability in the perceived category: 75% of the subjects identified /ba/ and /da/, half of them also identified /ga/, and 25% of the subjects were able to identify /ba/ and /ga/ only. These data suggest that while F2 transitions are important for perceiving place of articulation of Hebrew voiced stops, they cannot predict the perceived category. It also supports the notion that normal-hearing listeners differ in the relative importance they assign to the cues for the perception of place of articulation.